We should have smart tools make us smarter, not dumber

// Translation of my 'How hard can it be?'-column in this weekend's de Volkskrant .

In the first decade of this century, the Dutch ANWB roadside assistance hotline increasingly received calls from people stranded on the road who had no idea where they were. This coincided with the rise of navigation systems and apps. To navigate with a road map, you need to know where you are, but with GPS navigation, you can blindly follow the directions.

The more automated your navigation aid, the less aware you are of your surroundings, as researchers from the universities of Ume? and Zürich showed in an experiment. And with prolonged, intensive use of navigation, your navigation skills decrease, according to research published in Nature.

Smart things have a tendency to make you dumber. For instance, I used to memorize entire series of phone numbers, and now I don't even remember my wife's number. I don't need to remember all those numbers anymore because I have a device for that. Works great. Until I forget my phone, or it's out of charge, and I need to call my wife on someone else's phone.

Our smart devices take over tasks from us, but in doing so, we sometimes lose skills we would actually want to keep. Mental arithmetic, navigating, and speaking another language, for example.

Living in Sweden, I send many emails to colleagues and friends in Swedish. I am taking a language course, and every email I write is obviously an opportunity to practice. Unless I let online translation tools like Google Translate or Deepl compose those emails. Then I might have a (pretty) good Swedish email, but my ability to write in Swedish hasn't been engaged, and thus not trained.

Therefore I now use ChatGPT as a corrector and language coach. I write my emails myself, but then I ask ChatGPT: 'Korrigera denna text'. Then I get the corrected text from ChatGPT, with the changed parts in bold and a bullet-point explanation of the grammatical reasons behind these changes. This way, I get both a better email and—hopefully—become a little better in Swedish.

We are getting more and more smart tools and can thus start to lose more and more important skills. Unless we start to use and design our smart tools in such a way that they not only help us perform a task but also help us develop or maintain a desired skill.

The ANWB nowadays receives far fewer calls from motorists who don't know where they are. Not because the navigation function in their On-the-go app is designed to gradually teach you the Dutch road network and make you aware of your location. Instead, it's because the app has a function that allows you to automatically send your location when you're stranded. Then you don't need to know anything anymore.

>> Read full column in Dutch on the website of de Volkskrant.